I’ve read stories about the use of schools to indoctrinate students against Christianity in the Communist block all my life. Most of the methods that I read about were crude, but effective. I put the behavior of an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University smack in the middle of crude and overt use of the classroom to attack Christians and Christianity. Evidently, Dr Deandre Poole wrote the name Jesus on a piece of paper, put it on the floor and... Read more
Persecution doesn’t begin with violence. It begins with verbal insult, moves to legal prohibitions, which lead to pushing groups out of the mainstream of society and ends up at violent persecution. Christians all over the world appear to be somewhere on that continuum. Here in the West, Christians have endured verbal insult for quite some time. This has risen to publicly tolerated hate speech and a media that will not report stories about Christians, however positive, without adding some... Read more
Pope watchers the world over are well aware that Pope Francis has a love and a calling for the poor. He has told us that this inspired his choice of names. This emphasis on the poor has caused some disquiet in certain circles. What, they wonder, about the other things? Rumors have flown like mosquitos, claiming that our Holy Father mocked his own election, will abandon traditional marriage, is going to upend the liturgy and allow … what was it?... Read more
Ninety percent of weekly-mass Catholics are happy with Pope Francis. That’s what I call a majority. A recent Pew Research Center Poll on how American Catholics feel about their new Pope indicated overwhelming support. Sixty-two percent of infrequent churchgoers approved of our new Holy Father. A CNA article about the survey says in part: Washington D.C., Mar 21, 2013 / 12:02 am (CNA).- A new survey shows that U.S. Catholics are overwhelmingly content with the election of Pope Francis,... Read more
I was jittery before I published Women and the Church yesterday. I was afraid that, since I mentioned the presence of homosexual priests in our Church, I would stir up a hornet’s nest of attacks on homosexual priests. Silly me. Women are sooo much more the object of discrimination than homosexuals. No group of people on this planet can outrank women on the hated scale. I was inundated with comments from men (While I know there are women-hating women and... Read more
The culture wars are fought with money and words rather than bullets. Perhaps the most damaging weapon is slander. Every public person I know has been slandered. By slander I mean the deliberate character assassination of a person to destroy their effectiveness as advocates for certain viewpoints such as pro life or favoring traditional marriage. Pope Francis was the object of slander in 2005 when his name first surfaced as a possible candidate for the papacy. The old rumors were... Read more
I love this photo. Why? Because it shows our new pope washing the feet of both women and men on Holy Thursday. Catholics of a certain stripe look for holiness in anything that diminishes women. Righteousness is wanting to do away with altar girls, ending the service of women readers and extraordinary eucharistic ministers. These same folk are adamant that only people with y chromosomes should have their feet washed by a priest on Holy Thursday. In each of these... Read more
I don’t have a lot to say about this for now — I’ll probably get around to saying quite a lot later — but I think it’s wonderful. I love our Pope! From Vatican Information Service: FRANCIS WILL SAY HOLY THURSDAY MASS IN A ROMAN PRISON Vatican City, 21 March 2013 (VIS) – On Holy Thursday, 28 March, the Holy Father Francis will celebrate the Chrism Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in the morning and then, at 5:30pm in... Read more
Andreas, the Jesuit receptionist must have a short fuse. At least it appears he does considering his quick response to what he thought was a crank caller. It was an understandable mistake. After all, everybody knows that popes don’t dial their own phones. According to a Vatican official, “When the pope wants to call someone, an official usually calls a secretary who places the call.” That’s the way things have always been. Until now. Francis, the black-shoe-wearing-hotel-bill-paying Pope is also... Read more
It’s still Lent. We’ve got a week and a half of the deepest, darkest passage in human history to relive. Jesus arrested, betrayed, beaten, tortured, shamed and murdered; that’s what lies ahead of us in these next days. We are approaching the depths of Lent; the remembrance of humanity’s greatest crime against innocence in the flesh. And we are almost there. But how do you do lent in a time of feasting? Last week, the Papal Conclave elected the first... Read more
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